Outlaws Inc. (18 page)

But the truth is a complex, multilayered thing. And so what I am about to tell you could also be the full story. It may also be what really happened.

By August 1995, relations between Russia and even the northern Afghan government were tense, Russia accusing the Afghans of fomenting unrest in Tajikistan. Still, with a nod and a nudge from the security forces, Viktor Bout was commissioned to fly munitions into Kabul under the radar, on the quiet, for the more moderate mujahideen of the Northern Alliance.

Bout knew the pilot, Sharpatov, who'd been flying for him regularly since they met in a Sharjah hotel bar. This was not the first time he and his crew had done the arms and ammo run from Albania through to Kabul in the Candid, and Sharpatov knew exactly what he was carrying and how careful he would have to be to avoid detection. Normally, it was fine—
nichevo
. But not this time. The radio operator failed to maintain radio silence, and the Taliban air force's MiG-21 intercepted them.

According to investigators Farah and Braun, when news of their captivity reached Bout, he hit the cell phones. Bout himself told
New York Times
journalist Peter Landesman that he called the Taliban commanders, attempting to kick-start solo negotiations with them by phone, then flew to Kandahar himself but was denied access. The commanders were convinced that the flight had to have been an official Russian air force mission and would only go through the government, but their negotiations also stalled. Quite why the Taliban's men should have become so convinced of that fact is an intriguing question that's never really been fully addressed. Was it simple paranoia? The inability of a highly politically committed group to see a simple private arms deal for what it was? Marshal Shaposhnikov's flat “No comment” when I press him on the issue, even years later, of whether this was indeed in some way a covert state mission raises the tantalizing prospect of a black op of some kind through a deniable middleman like Bout.

For many months, nothing was heard. Then, behind the scenes, Bout, whether alone or in consultation with the cash-strapped Russian military, reportedly came to an agreement that both he and the Taliban could live with. They'd allow the men and their plane to “escape” if Bout would agree to supply them with planeloads of arms and ammo from now on. Everybody was a winner. Within days, the crew were allowed to fly home.

One source at the UN who actually knows Bout and prefers to remain off the record claimed to me in the spring of 2010 that Bout had once told him that he'd just been doing what he'd been instructed to do by “someone much further up the food chain.” Just who that person is has never been fully established—and if Marshal Shaposhnikov knows, he isn't saying—though there are claims Bout's father-in-law is a former KGB grandee, and these days is one of Vladimir Putin's staunchest backers.

And while he was freer with his hints in the old days, since the heat came on, Bout's lips have got tighter too. Once, when he was asked outright, he said, “They didn't escape; they were extracted. There are huge forces—” and then promptly clammed up. In an interview with the
New York Times
shortly before his arrest, he appeared on the verge of saying more, then backed down once again: “[My clients are governments, but] I keep my mouth shut,” he said. Then, pointing to the middle of his forehead: “If I told you any more, I'd get the red hole right here.”

Indeed, the FSB were not averse to reminding cargo operators who held the whip hand. In 2000 the Russian secret service, perhaps embarrassed by Bout's increasingly high profile, perhaps as a friendly warning across the bow, appeared to make a terrifying example of one of his Il-76 operator peers. In September of that year, masked FSB men announced they had seized an Il-76 carrying twenty-two tons of hidden cargo unlisted on its documents, then raided the offices of its operator, a Moscow-based cargo outfit called East Line working out of Domodedovo airport around thirty kilometers from the city, whose regular patterns of flights to Pakistan, the Arab Emirates, India, China, and South Korea seemed to have flagged what they had long suspected: This was a major smuggling operation, with one goal being the evasion of customs on contraband from China. Despite the protestations of the director general, Amiran Kurtanidze, the armed, balaclava-clad FSB agents trashed the office, pulling out drawers and filing cabinets, and walked out with all the company's computers and paperwork, effectively paralyzing East Line's entire cargo operation.

News of the bust spread fast: Two more of the company's planes were found idling on remote runways in Siberia and Nizhny Novgorod, their crews, having got the news on the radio en route from China with twenty-nine tons of illicit cargo hidden “beneath the floorboards,” tried to turn and head back to China before running low on fuel. They then promptly landed their planes and fled into the steppes and the villages, leaving them
Mary Celeste
–style, to be discovered hours later, radios still crackling.

But there was a twist. Kurtanidze claimed to the press that the busts and charges of wrongdoing were, first of all, mistakes that could easily have been rectified—and then part of an elaborate setup orchestrated by a shadowy group he called the “Reconciliation and Accord Foundation” that was trying to control routes to China as an air-cargo operator for its own dark purposes, and to snuff out any “competition.”

Some of the braver Russian newspapers went further: the FSB, they said, was harassing one of the precious few good companies. East Line had set up in the tough days of 1993 at Domodedovo, and, it was claimed, had refused to pay the mafia groups who were crawling all over the airport. This was, it was whispered, nothing but a shakedown by
mafiya
elements within the Russian state itself. Russian business paper
Kommersant
speculated that a strengthening of control over customs clearance, or a personal business interest from a member of the government, were behind the raid. While the investigation dragged on East Line's fortunes plummeted, and by the time it was quietly dropped, after a succession of government statements reiterating their claims about the airline but not one prosecution, Kurtanidze was gone, and aviators, exporters, and charterers across the former Soviet territories were in no doubt as to who the real players were.

To Russians at the time, the rumors of official skulduggery were all too believable. If anything, the FSB seemed to be treading unusually softly. The raid, well-publicized and dramatic as it was, was very little, very late. It would certainly send out an obvious warning to other crews and middlemen that they knew exactly what was going on. But by that point neither Mickey nor any of the other crews, charterers, or businessmen in on the world's richest smuggling scene could stop trafficking—even if they'd wanted to. The money was simply too good.

To this day, the FSB—if it was indeed the FSB who ordered the bust, and not private interests working within the security service—has never acted against these airlines or their crews again. Nor has any more been heard from the Reconciliation and Accord Foundation.

Certainly, covert influence in the affairs of cargo operators is not unknown. As Grigory Omelchenko, the former chief of Ukrainian counterintelligence, told Peter Landesman of the
New York Times
, “Traffickers like Bout are either protected or killed. There's total state control.” Perhaps, then, Ilya Neretin's claim is not quite true. Maybe whoever was covering the arms shipment was watching all the time. Perhaps the crew weren't, after all, alone without help from any quarter.

SLIGHT, MOUSY-HAIRED, AND leather jacketed, Andrei Alexeivich Soldatov looks more like the bass player in an indie band than the scourge of the Russian secret service's more maverick tendencies. And like Mickey's opposing angel, he's also something of a Zelig, popping up at the scene at the most crucial points in the post-Soviet story. At just twenty-one, he became a reporter for the newspaper
Sevodnya
and paper-hopped, covering the Beslan school siege and massacre and the Moscow theater-hostage crisis. He's met defectors, followed spies, and uncovered Kremlin complicity in criminal behavior. But now aged thirty-four, it's as an investigator into the black ops and extrajudicial activities of Russia's secret service networks, past and present, that Soldatov is best known.

“A lot of these flights in and out of Afghanistan are clearly enjoying some protection,” he agrees. He explains that his suspicions run to the idea that it may in fact be in Moscow's interests to keep a pipeline for secret cargoes open, and to know what's in other people's. He also suspects that a little visible heroin trafficking into Russia itself, with the odd carefully managed seizure here and there, plays into the hands of a Kremlin keen to point out NATO's inability to stamp out the smack trade at Russia's back door—perhaps works even as a pretext for greater intervention in Central Asia once more. “There's a new stage of the Great Game going on,” he smiles, recalling the covert jockeying for military and commercial influence in Afghanistan and India between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century. So much for disorganized crime.

But if someone is killing, protecting, raiding, or controlling all the traffickers using these flights, and if someone's letting just enough heroin into Russia to put pressure on NATO to exit Afghanistan, well, the question is, who? And just how high up do you need to go in order to find them?

“I always say to everybody, I'm not the police,” laughs Peter Danssaert when I call on him again, at his office in the dockside quarter of Antwerp, Belgium's historic diamond hub. This time I need help understanding what looks more and more like secret state collusion and less like a few freelance bad guys. “I'm not in this line of business to put people behind bars or whatever else.”

For Danssaert, these questions are part of what attracted him to the job of researching trafficking flights. “For me it's a puzzle—you have a problem to solve. If someone tells you there's an arms flight over here, or some arms are being sent there, for me the motivation is to find out how it's done, who's doing it. How does it fit into the bigger picture?

”You see, many times, these arms brokers and freight forwarders who are doing illicit and gray stuff are also doing legitimate stuff. And in a lot of cases, they're being hired by the same governments to do the same thing legally that they're doing illegally, or at least the same thing openly that they're doing illicitly! So, what I try to find out is, how? That's the puzzle that keeps it interesting for me.”

But Danssaert is one of a small group of people—too small, he'll readily admit—at shoestring-budget organizations in different countries, each attempting to monitor the migrations of arms and other destabilizing materials across the globe. It's a hard job made harder by the conflicting demands of funding organizations who want certain reports “out there” while their particular topic's hot—but they all want the reports to stand up, so they need to be methodically watertight. Danssaert says he's “working right now on one that started out twenty pages long, and it's now already two hundred pages. Amnesty are asking for it, but we've got to get it right. Hopefully we'll publish it in the summer. Or, uh, just after the summer.”

The job's also made harder, he says, by people who write about it. “When people write articles about it, they make it sound very easy, or at least much less complicated. But the world's a complicated place, and this business is far more complicated than it sometimes seems.”

And just how complicated it can be—and just how “licit” and “illicit” can become dangerously blurred—is perfectly illustrated, says Danssaert, by the thick, cultivated murk that always tends to envelop not just the operations but the attempts by governments and law-enforcement groups to stop them.

“For example,” he smiles, “my personal problem with a lot of these reports into [Bout's activities] is that they're completely self-referential,” he says. “I've even known a case where an author wrote an article with some suppositions in it, then the intelligence agencies used that article as the basis of one of their reports, and eventually leaked that internal report back to the journalist, who quoted ‘intelligence sources' in reporting it as fact!”

Indeed, it's the suspicion of underhanded dealings—along with the inability or disinclination of the CIA, Washington, and some investigators to respond when questions are raised about their claims—that plays into the Bout apologists' hands. Most famously, one of Danssaert's predecessors at IPIS, a Belgian investigator named Johan Peleman, has become something of a favorite target among Bout's camp, fairly or unfairly, for the perceived “sexiness” of his reports. “You can tell the ones with a hard-on to pin stuff on him easily,” says one investigator with amused contempt.

The punch line is supplied by the man himself, who, with typical flamboyance, acknowledges—even perhaps encourages—this diffuse infamy, seemingly delighting in playing jokes on those who've made Merchant of Death–watching into a lifetime pursuit. On his Web site, under “Contact Details,” it simply says: “Postal address: History book, intelligence files, and people's imagination.”

But Bout is only the most visible poster boy for the whole phenomenon of “merc” outfits—these maverick aviators who've been playing a large, unacknowledged part in world affairs.

So how hard can it be for the authorities to clean up the skies—especially in countries under lockdown like Afghanistan, Iraq? On paper, blacklisting should work, or at least extremely close performance management and observation. So should searches. So should a lot of things.

The twist is, in the worst places on earth, for the most dangerous, crucial jobs, Mickey and his comrades, with their screaming, taped-up Ilyushins and Antonovs, not to mention their low rate cards for a job, were often the only game in town. As one airman I call to check a few facts in spring 2011 jokes with me, laughing as he ad-libs to the tune of
Ghostbusters
: “Who you gonna call? Byelorussians!”